


Budapest, 1956

by azurish



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Angst, Canonical Character Death, Historical AU, Hope, M/M, Reincarnation, background Bahorel/Prouvaire, revolutions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-17
Updated: 2013-05-17
Packaged: 2017-12-12 02:53:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/806337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/azurish/pseuds/azurish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Combeferre and Courfeyrac remind each other why they fight.  When you're reincarnated across the ages and die every time, it's very easy to lose hope; luckily, they have each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Budapest, 1956

            “Everyone out.”  Enjolras looked up from where he was kneeling on the floor with Grantaire’s body in his lap, his hands crimson with blood and his face twisted into a grim mask neither Courfeyrac nor Combeferre had ever seen before.  There was livid bruise on his jaw and a powder burn across his cheek.  He looked half-mad; once the terror and fury of the battlefield, he seemed now reduced to wild-eyed grief and incomprehension.  A shudder ripped through him and he clenched his teeth.  “I need – everyone out.”

            Courfeyrac jerked towards him at the sounds of those harsh words, the movement abortive and instinctual.  He stopped – white, shaking, his fingers fluttering uselessly in midair – at a single, terrible look from Enjolras.  Unbidden, his eyes met Grantaire’s glassy, sightless stare, and he found himself transfixed.  His boots seemed rooted to the wooden floor of the tenement building, his gaze captured by the dead man’s, his heart caught between one beat and the next, his breath trapped in his throat.  He couldn’t look away.

            Combeferre’s hand on his shoulder, his palm warm through the thin, sweat-drenched cotton of Courfeyrac’s t-shirt, snapped him back to reality.  The beat of the other man’s heart through his palm seemed to restart Courfeyrac’s own pulse.  He stumbled over his own feet as the other man drew him back with a gentle tug and retreated until his shoulder blades bumped against Combeferre’s chest.  He couldn’t tell which of them derived more comfort from the physical connection between them – himself, for the solidity of his friend behind him (for as long as that would last, anyways), or Combeferre, drawing warmth and strength from Courfeyrac’s body beneath his palm – but neither moved to part.

            Combeferre met Enjolras’s eyes from over Courfeyrac’s shoulder; Courfeyrac could feel him tensing in response to whatever he saw in that horrible gaze.  Courfeyrac, for his part, could only look at the ground around his friends – around his leader and the dead body of the man who was one of the eight souls closest to him in the world.

            He’d seen them dead before.  He’d seen all of them in this room dead before.  He’d never been the first to die, so far; always cursed to see at least a few of his friends shot, stabbed, gassed, burned before he himself succumbed.  Today, with only himself, Combeferre, and Enjolras left alive, he was very aware that he might well be the last of them to die this time – might be forced to see all of his friends shot by ÁVH troops before he fell.  He’d never been the last before.  Whatever tiny part of his mind was still able to register horror was terrified at the thought: being _alone_ , the last, with all of them dead and gone before him wasn’t something he was sure he could face.  It was always chilling, whenever they met up again in a new time, to see those faces that he’d last seen contorted with pain, maimed, covered in blood now smiling and happy.

            Enjolras, though, was not quite so used to this particular horror – to the best of Courfeyrac’s memory, their leader had never remained alive long after Grantaire.  Ever since the first time, under the Parisian summer sun in 1832, those two had always been killed together.  It had seemed like some fundamental law of the universe – as though fate itself had been honoring the bond the two men shared.  But Grantaire had taken three bullets to the chest out in the street just minutes ago and Enjolras had sat there with his lover’s body in his lap like a bad dream and watched the life spill out of him, crimson and coppery and so very finite.

            Combeferre reached the end of whatever wordless exchange he’d been holding with Enjolras; squeezing Courfeyrac’s shoulder one last time, his hand slipped away and he turned and left the building.  Courfeyrac followed his lead.  The door swung shut with a booming finality, making a far more solid noise than either would have expected from the rickety entrance and leaving Enjolras alone in that tomb of a tenement.

            The streets of Budapest around them were ominously empty.  From the near distance, though, the sounds of gunshots and the cries of the nearby battle echoed out in the cold, empty, early morning air.  Harsh, guttural syllables of Hungarian were interspersed with simple, pained shouts and screams – the universal language of suffering.  It was a language in which Courfeyrac had found himself growing unpleasantly fluent during his nearly century-and-a-half-long existence.

            The two men stood next to each other for a moment, bracing themselves against both the chill of the wind and the tragedies they had seen that morning, before Courfeyrac slumped back down against the wall of a nearby building.  His legs gave out and folded beneath him like a marionette whose strings had been cut.  Combeferre sunk down next to him a moment later, off-handedly balancing his M44 against the wall to one side.  Courfeyrac’s own captured gun still rested in his limp hands.

            “I don’t –” Courfeyrac’s voice cracked when he tried to speak.  He took a deep, shuddering breath and let it out before going on.  “I can’t continue like this.  We can’t.  I can’t see you, or Grantaire, or Bahorel, or – or any of you dead again.”  His hands shook slightly as images from the bloodbath in the streets earlier ran through his mind.  There had been tanks – tanks! – and screaming and that last desperate radio broadcast from Nagy that had made Jehan cry and then bodies all around him and –

            It was to be his friends in the end, then, who would break him.  He paused, forced himself to think that over.  Well.  He could acknowledge that.  He’d always shared far too much of himself with the other members of Les Amis de l’ABC; he’d simply failed to see that in providing the others with light and warmth, he was burning himself down to the wick.  Having spent the last century watching those he loved and cared for die, he found himself exhausted and suddenly stricken by a hopeless sort of grief.  The universe had hammered away on him for years and years and years and now he felt himself crack with a sort of inevitability.  “I can’t see all of us dead again.”

            Combeferre, to Courfeyrac’s surprise, nodded, defeated.  “I’d thought we were getting somewhere, with the war over,” he said, his words weighted and weary.  His expression was far-off, and Courfeyrac felt, for a moment, terrifyingly distanced from the man who’d been one of his guiding lights.  “I’d assumed we were heading towards a bright new future – the crimes and excesses of the past now understood, progress continuing on with inexorable momentum, and civilization at last ready to take its inevitable place.  _Il arrivera donc, ce moment où le soleil n’éclairera plus, sur la terre, que des hommes libres, et ne reconnaissant d’autre maître que leur raison_.”  The cherished quotation rested heavily on his tongue, its words worn and frayed from the passage of the years.  “That moment seemed to be coming!  This – this Iron Curtain, as Bahorel’s Churchill was so fond of saying – was – one last blip, one last obstacle to overcome, before we could truly flourish in the light.  We would be leading the way forward here, in Hungary, for the rest of the world.  The Americans would live up to their Radio Free Europe promises and we would be ... we would be ...”  He trailed off and reached up to adjust his glasses – an emotional tic with which Courfeyrac had grown intimately familiar over the course of the years – before realizing that he’d lost them in the battle in Kossuth Square earlier.  Instead, he simply let his forehead fall to rest against his knuckles, as if his hands alone were propping up the great weight of his mind, with all his memories, hopes, and dreams.  He sighed deeply, all the air in his chest seeming to leave him in a single exhale.

            At the sound, something tightened sharply within Courfeyrac; almost involuntarily, he reached out towards his friend, his own miseries cast aside for the time being.  He cradled the other man’s face in his palms, relieving him at least of that burden.  Combeferre met his eyes and though his gaze was dull, at least he seemed to be _seeing him_ now.

            It was enough.  Courfeyrac spoke.  “You can’t give up those hopes so easily, _mieus mia_.”  The Occitan words sprang unbidden to his lips: a reminder of an earlier time, somehow oddly appropriate now, a century later and in another country.  He rubbed his fingertips along his lover’s blunt cheekbones, clearing a lighter trail in the gunpowder and dust on his face.  He continued, his words growing hot, “There will always be civilization for you to –”

            “For us to die in vain for?” Combeferre asked, the words rough, cutting at the heart of Courfeyrac’s argument.

            Courfeyrac controlled his flinch; it was Combeferre himself who winced at the uncharacteristic sentiment.  He frowned and reached a hand up to readjust his glasses – only to realize yet again that he had lost them.  Instead, he left one hand resting on Courfeyrac’s wrist, thumb trailing idly against his pulse.

            When spoken aloud, the hopelessness that had gripped him seemed to fall under its own weight, the words hollow in the morning air.  In a moment, they were rendered obsolete by a refrain of the Hungarian national anthem, which a group of rebels began singing a few streets over.  “Hozz rá víg esztendőt,” a chorus of rough voices sang.  They were slightly out of harmony with each other, but the melody still rose up clearly towards the heavens.  The song was exactly right for these brave young men, fighting to free their motherland from the occupying Soviets, struggling for freedom and democracy all alone in the face of an uncaring world, courageous and bold, with the audacity to rise up and challenge a world power for the love of their country and their families.  There was nothing that could cow that kind of indomitable spirit.  “Megbűnhődte már e nép a múltat s jövendőt!”

            That, too, was one of the universal languages with which Combeferre and Courfeyrac were familiar: the triumph conveyed by voices joined in jubilant, patriotic song.  It was common to all barricades, wars, and uprisings – a specific joyous combination of noise and exultation that was easily comprehended, no matter the language barrier.  They sat there for a few seconds, just listening.

            “I’m sorry,” Combeferre amended after a moment, reaching his other hand up to cover one of Coufeyrac’s hands.  “I’m sorry.  Forgive me.  I – I’m disheartened after today.  I had truly believed that the Americans ...  It was foolish.  What happened here in Hungary will make its mark on history – will change the world eventually.  These young men will be the heroes of history; they’ll inspire the world for generations to come.  Just, in the moment, it all seems so ...”  His voice caught in his throat.  “I had thought we had won, finally.”

            “I know,” Courfeyrac said quietly.  “It’s all right.  I know you’ll always believe in the dream.  You’d never let anything stop you.”  He simply shrugged.  “It’s understandable.  After this morning we’re all – a bit broken.”  The adjective was a pitiful attempt at expressing the result of seeing six of their closest friends die all over again in the fury and fire of a revolution brutally suppressed – but with no other words to comprehend the enormity of the experience it was the one he chose.  There was a certain point at which they had to communicate in a language of their very own, a language of shared experiences for which humanity had no words.

            It was Combeferre’s turn to forget his concerns.  “How are you?” he asked instead.  “This morning – what happened?”

            Courfeyrac closed his eyes and tried to draw back, but Combeferre kept him firmly anchored, pressing his lover’s palm flat against his own cheek and holding him in place.  “I saw – I was with Bahorel and Prouvaire, when they died at Kossuth Square.  They had those tanks with them.  One ripped a hole through Bahorel’s chest, just clean through, and then Prouvaire couldn’t take it any longer and plunged into the fray ...”  He forced his eyes back open again, so that the images would stop playing out on the insides his closed eyelids.  His eyes flickered down to the collar of his shirt, and Combeferre, for the first time, noticed the spray of blood there.  Realizing the significance of the other man’s look, Combeferre felt his stomach clench.  At length, Courfeyrac tore his gaze away from his contemplation of what Combeferre was now certain was Bahorel’s blood, and added,  “I’ve never been that close and escaped unscathed.  I never want to be again.”

            Combeferre nodded.  “But you _are_ still here, with me.  For now, at least.”

            “Yes.”  Courfeyrac sighed.  “I just can’t see you all dead, anymore.  I – can’t.”

            “Would you rather see us give up, though?” Combeferre asked, the question gentle.  “When I said that I wasn’t so sure that Condorcet’s sunlit moment would come to pass – do you want that doubt for all of us?”

            “No!”

            “But that would be the only way we’d stop fighting,” Combeferre said.  He rose to his knees and reached out towards Courfeyrac with his free hand.  Smoothing back the other man’s hair carefully, he trapped and tucked aside a sweat-soaked ginger curl.

            “I –”

            “Would you see Enjolras lose his republic?  Feuilly stop believing in the people?  Prouvaire give up his conviction in the core gentleness and goodness of man?”

            Courfeyrac sighed and shook his head.  “No.  Never.”

            “We’re all tied to those beliefs, Courfeyrac.  We wouldn’t be the men you admire and love if we weren’t.”

            “I know.  Watching you die again, though ...  I love you all too much.”

            “But is there any better way to die than for those beliefs we hold dear?  We were none of us intended to live simple lives, I think.  I would – will – proudly die and fight with you again for any cause in which we believe.”

            Courfeyrac pondered Combeferre’s words for a moment, and then the hard edges of tension in his shoulders slowly dissipated, leaving behind instead a tired and worn – but still graceful – determination.  “Thank you,” he said after a moment.

            “And you.  For – reminding me.”

            “Always.”  _For as many revolutions, as many deaths, as many lifetimes as it takes_ , Courfeyrac added in his mind, unaware that Combeferre was voicing nearly the exact same sentiment in his own head.

**Author's Note:**

> OK, so, this is a repost/somewhat edited version of a fic I posted last year on tumblr? ... hopefully it's moderately better now. Merp.
> 
> Also, thing two, if you have never read about the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, you really ought to, because it will tear your heart out. There's a reason I chose to set a fic in which both they nearly lose all hope /and/ in which they manage to emerge with their hope restored in Budapest in 1956, and it is because that revolution was so meaningful - so important - so tragic - so awful and beautiful at once. My family's Hungarian, and so I definitely start out with a bias, but I promise, it's a very worthwhile period to read about, particularly if the kind of political self-sacrifice and revolutionary wonder that's represented in Les Amis resonates with you.
> 
> Additionally, I'd like to add that I think the credit for the reincarnation-style history AU goes to Vee, who's no longer on tumblr but who used to be under the URL http://keeping-up-with-les-amis.tumblr.com/. I didn't know it when I first wrote the fic - I thought it was a fandom-trope concept - but I'd just like to say thank you again for letting me play in your sandbox, and I still miss you on tumblr. <3
> 
> (And finally, reviews make me a happy panda? *shrug*)


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